The voice on the other end was patient but unsympathetic, “Next time give him his vodka. He just got the Order of the Red Star, so give it to him.”
The incredulous Malygin stormed back to his warehouse and stood helplessly in the midst of the shattered rows of spirits. Within hours, Lieutenant Bezditko’s liquor ration resumed and Malygin never again interfered with Ivan the Terrible’s larceny.
The story went round the trenches and brought chuckles from most Russians. To them, the quest for liquor was a serious pursuit, one which sometimes assumed even more disastrous proportions. Only recently, soldiers of the 284th Division lines had found several cisterns filled with alcohol. After draining them, the Russians found one more cistern brimming with more spirits. Again they drank the well dry, but this time it was wood alcohol. Four men died and countless others went blind.
The tragedy failed to daunt the appetite of the other troops, some of whom began drinking cologne to ease the terror of living under the brow of Mamaev Hill.
Other 284th Division troops found diversion with two Russian women who had set up light housekeeping on the battlefield. The only entrance to their cellar was through a door that had to be lifted up from the ground. Beneath was a room, twelve by twelve feet square, lit by a kerosene lamp. A mattress lay on the floor with fifteen or twenty pillows ranged about it. One of the girls, a thirty-year-old brunette, had managed to find bright red lipstick, which she wore all the time. The younger one, a blonde, seemed pale and sickly.
The girls had an old gramophone in the corner and several records. The one they played for visiting soldiers was an Argentine tango and everyone who came to the cellar learned it by heart. Some soldiers found the women offensive. One was heard to say: “Those bitches are just waiting for the Germans to arrive.” But in the meantime, the girls played their Argentinian tango and entertained lines of men, who ignored shells and bullets to spend a few minutes with them.
Just a mile west of the cellar bordello, two other Russian women fought to stay alive. Natasha Kornilov and her crippled mother had been trapped in their backyard storehouse behind German lines for nearly seven weeks. Every morning the eleven-year-old girl scrounged garbage from German field kitchens. Every night she combed her mother’s hair and sang lullabies to her.
Natasha’s cheeks were sunken in from hunger. Her eyes bulged, and she moved slowly, heavily. But she always smiled at her mother, who lay on the concrete floor and prayed for deliverance. Mercifully, the German soldiers left the Kornilovs alone. That was the only reprieve granted the starving women.
In Dar Gova, two miles south of the Kornilov’s grim hovel, another Russian youth, fifteen-year-old Sacha Fillipov, continued his dual life. Going from office to office, barracks to barracks, the young master cobbler mended hundreds of pairs of German boots. He also stole documents from officers’ desks and carried them through the lines to Russian intelligence officers. Otherwise, in the hours he was not working, Sacha played hopscotch in the streets. The Germans never connected the frail boy’s presence with grenade explosions that blew down soldiers’ billets.
Several nights a week Sacha left home to report enemy troop movements. He always returned safely, and went to bed without giving his parents any details. Though they knew he worked for the Red Army, the Fillipovs never pressed their son for information.
One night he rushed home to warn them to get out of the house by dawn. They followed his instructions and in the morning, Russian artillery shells rained down on a German staff headquarters only a few doors away. Sacha had given his superiors the exact coordinates.
In the Beketovka Bulge, five miles south of Stalingrad, a dramatic buildup of Soviet troops and equipment had been completed. These were the southern strike armies requisitioned by Zhukov for Operation Uranus, and a small percentage of the troops had come from the holocaust in Stalingrad.
One of them was Lt. Hersch Gurewicz. He had finally left the factory area with its ceaseless noise and filth, and gone to the far shore where he ate Spam from America and for the first time, got a glimmer of hope. While munching the canned food, he realized that help was coming from outside Russia and that the “senseless” holding operation around the factories might have some meaning after all. Counting the ranks of his antitank unit, he hoped this was true. Of his one hundred men, eighty had perished in Stalingrad.
Instead of a rest period of two weeks, the lieutenant received new orders. With his company’s ranks refilled, he went south on the eastern shore of the Volga and then across to the area of Beketovka. While no one mentioned an offensive, the feeling of it was in the air.
After his orgy of killing on the streets of Latashanka in September, Sgt. Alexei Petrov had returned to his .122-millimeter gun and lived in a shellhole three hundred yards west of the Volga cliff.
Like his batterymates, Petrov never washed or changed his uniform. He was infested with lice. The gray bugs nested all over his body, even in the seams of his trousers. His only diversion was lining them up on the ground on a bet to see who could field the largest army of parasites. A rumor that he was being relieved turned into a joyful reality, and Petrov crossed the Volga to a rest camp where, for days, he luxuriated in hot baths and suffered the delousing process without protest.
Refitted with winter clothing, including a white parka and valenki (fur boots), he was propelled back into the war. Sent south of Stalingrad, the sergeant taught a new gun crew the rudiments of firing a heavy-caliber fieldpiece, while the ever-present political officers harangued them on the need for determination against the Fascists.
Petrov listened to the politrook and thought often about his family, somewhere beyond the western horizon. He had never received a clue to their whereabouts, and the burden of not knowing the truth preyed on his mind.
Nikita Khrushchev also appeared in the Beketovka Bulge. Clothed in a fur coat and hat, the commissar went from camp to camp, joking with soldiers and asking about their gripes. He was in an excellent mood.
His comrade, Gen. Andrei Yeremenko was not. Fidgeting at his new headquarters on the western side of the Volga, Yeremenko worried about his part in Operation Uranus. He also seethed over the slight he had experienced when Marshal Rokossovsky assumed defense of the city. Yeremenko felt he deserved better from Stalin.
The hours to Uranus rushed by, but in Stalingrad the Germans ignored reality.
Satisfied that the 48th Panzer Corps was strong enough to hold the left flank, Paulus obeyed Hitler’s edict to hit the Russians hard while the river ice interrupted Chuikov’s supply lines. North of the captured tractor factory, the 16th Panzer Division attempted once again to seize the suburb of Rynok, which the panzers first had entered on that lovely summer afternoon in August.
From north and south the 16th Panzers attacked, only to find the town bristling with Russian guns, a labryinth of trenches, hidden stationary tanks, and bazookas. But the German soldiers methodically moved down the streets, blowing up bunkers and pillboxes. Russian and German corpses left a ghastly trail.
A battalion led by Captain Mues cleared the area south of town, reached the Volga, and turned north. It was Mues’s intention to shake hands in the center of Rynok with German units cutting into it from other directions. Fog and a light snow began to obscure vision but the aggressive Mues pushed on. Fearless, revered by his men as “immortal,” he was tracked by a Soviet sniper, who put a bullet in his brain. The attack stopped abruptly as Mues’s troops gathered around the stricken officer, now unconscious and near death. They ignored the bullets and cried over the man they loved.
An officer from another regiment finally came, lifted Mues in his arms and staggered away with the heavy burden. Soldiers who had fought with the captain through Russia broke down and collapsed. Others became fearful and timid as news of his death spread like a bushfire.
The Russians continued to hold Rynok. The 16th Panzer Division was inside the suburb, but in twenty-four hours, it had occupied only five blocks.
With Uranus less tha
n thirty-six hours away, Joseph Stalin got cold feet. Behind the blacked-out windows in his Kremlin apartment, he paced the floor, alternately sucking his pipe and running its mouthpiece through his mustache, listening all the while to Marshals Zhukov and Vasilevsky. Both men had received urgent summonses to come to the Kremlin. On the eve of H-hour, when they were most needed at the front lines, neither marshal had expected he would have to debate the merits of the operation.
But they had reckoned without the “insubordination” of one of their field commanders, Gen. Viktor T. Volsky, whose 4th Mechanized Corps was to act as right flank for the southern prong of the offensive. From his headquarters near the Tzatza lakes, south of Stalingrad, the depressed general had written a personal letter to Stalin, warning him “as an honest Communist” that lack of adequate manpower and material meant disaster for the Red Army in the coming attack.
Stalin acted quickly to protect himself and brought the marshals directly to the capital to answer the charges. Zhukov and Vasilevsky rendered a controlled, dispassionate recital of the facts. Evidently satisfied, the premier went to the phone and called Volsky. Without any show of anger, he reassured the general that the offensive had been properly conceived. While Zhukov and Vasilevsky listened in amazement, Stalin cordially accepted Volsky’s apologies and hung up.
Vasilevsky received permission to fly back immediately to the Don Front, but Stalin kept Zhukov in Moscow, ostensibly to plan a diversionary attack west of the capital to throw the Germans off balance. Near the Tzatza lakes, the chagrined General Volsky tried to recover from his conversation with the premier. Sweating profusely, the pale officer pulled out a handkerchief and coughed into it. Clots of blood stained the cloth as he wiped his mouth.
For weeks Volsky had been hiding the truth from everyone. An old nemesis, tuberculosis of the throat, had returned to ravage his system. Physically and psychologically, the commander of the 4th Tank Corps was unfit to participate in an undertaking of such magnitude, but he refused to give in to the disease and go to a sanitarium. For Volsky, the road to Uranus had been filled with heartbreak and dogged determination to conquer his affliction. He had spent months in hospitals, resting, reading, and waiting for the doctor’s certificate of good health. Now on the eve of the great counterstroke against the Nazis, he had no intention of relinquishing his command.
But the illness was preying on him. He had lost weight; he drank only tea and nibbled biscuits. Moreover, he suffered fits of melancholia, which tended to affect his judgment. It had been during one of those depressions that he had written his pessimistic letter to Joseph Stalin.
With his own “D day” nearing swiftly, Volsky went to bed to husband his strength.
Darkness came to the steppe before four o’clock on the afternoon of November 18. Gusty winds sprang up and drove soldiers into warm shelters. The rolling thunder of cannon never let up from the eastern horizon where sporadic bursts of flame in the blackness marked the German pioneers’ stubborn attempts to dislodge Lyudnikov’s men from the sandspit. Fireworks crowned the heights of Mamaev Hill; occasional necklaces of tracer bullets wove exotic patterns along the perimeters at the Lazur and Red October plants. As the Germans on the steppe noted, it was a normal night in Stalingrad.
But one hundred miles northwest of the city, along the serpentine glaze of the freezing Don, nothing was normal. Rumanian spotters had begun to phone in reports of hundreds of Soviet tank motors revving up, of the movement of thousands of artillery pieces along roads inside the bridgeheads at Serafimovich and Kletskaya. The observers added that columns of Red Army troops were assembled in marching order behind armor and ordnance.
In his advisory post at Rumanian Army Headquarters, Lt. Gerhard Stöck transmitted the ominous details back to Sixth Army Headquarters at Golubinka. Stöck, a crew-cut former Olympic medal winner in the javelin, spoke urgently to Capt. Winrich Behr, operations officer under Arthur Schmidt. After each sighting, Behr went to a map and recorded the Russian movements. They added up to what he had heard from a captured Soviet officer who, earlier in the day, had told his interrogators the long-planned offensive would begin within twenty-four hours.
Behr warned Schmidt and Paulus, who seemed extraordinarily calm. Both generals gave orders to alert the 48th Panzer Corps for immediate duty, and expressed confidence in the panzers’ ability to blunt any breakthrough.
Winrich Behr was not so optimistic. He still remembered his conversation with a man he had replaced in October. The officer had taken Behr to the situation map, spread his hands over it and traced where the enemy would attack on both sides of the Sixth Army: “They will meet around here,” he said, and his finger landed on Kalach, forty miles west of Stalingrad. Now, a month later, Behr recalled the prophecy and wondered about the future.
The phone kept ringing with alarming intelligence. Though no shots had been fired, the Russian positions were alive with menacing energy. Radio traffic increased a thousandfold; coded messages filled the air. Captain Behr made notations on his map as rapidly as he could, while outside his office, light snow collected on the ground.
Just before midnight, Vassili Chuikov sat in his cliffside bunker overlooking the Volga and tried to interpret a message from front headquarters requesting him to stand by for an important announcement. Chuikov had no idea what it meant until Kuzma Gurov, his chief political commissar with the Sixty-second Army, suddenly slapped his forehead and shouted: “I know, it’s the order for the big counteroffensive!”
The order came through at midnight. Chuikov felt a tremendous surge of satisfaction as he realized that the last sixty-eight days of fighting in Stalingrad had bought the time needed to prepare the counterattack. And soon he would have his vengeance against the German Sixth Army.
PART TWO
Chapter Sixteen
In the natural land bridge between the Don and the Volga to the west of Stalingrad, Paulus had concentrated practically all of his combat divisions for the purpose of capturing the city. But he had stationed most of the supply dumps needed to maintain those divisions on the far side of the Don, to the west where it makes a gigantic loop before curving southward toward the Sea of Azov. And it was this vulnerable rear area that the Russian High Command had pinpointed as a priority target for the first phase of Operation Uranus.
At 6:30 A.M. on November 19, the predawn darkness between Serafimovich and Kletskaya became a brilliant blaze of orange and red flame as thirty-five hundred Russian guns heralded the attack.
Trapped in straw-lined trenches, soldiers of the Rumanian Third Army watched the artillery bursts march precisely up and down their lines. Bunkers collapsed, suffocating hundreds; shell-shocked men screamed in fear and blocked their ears to escape the terrifying noise. When the cannonade finally stopped, the Rumanians heard the ominous sound of tank motors as the Russian Fifth and Twenty-first Tank armies burst forth from their bridgeheads.
The T-34s stormed through clinging fog and snow into the lines of bewildered Rumanians. Most succumbed to “tank fright,” leapt from cover, and ran. Only a few stayed to duel the armor.
Eight miles to the south, a German weather observer, Sgt. Wolf Pelikan, stirred fitfully in his warm cot as he tried to ignore the rolling gunfire intruding on his sleep. It continued, so Pelikan slipped out of bed and dressed. Dirt cascaded on him from the ceiling and he swore as he brushed off his uniform. When the noise suddenly ceased, he finished dressing in a more leisurely manner, and his thoughts turned to breakfast and the pancakes he liked so well.
A shout brought him to the door and he recognized a company messenger, pointing frantically to the north.
“The Ivans are here! The Ivans are here!” he kept saying.
Pelikan hollered back, “You’re crazy.”
The commotion awakened his comrades, who poured from the bunker to laugh at the messenger. Someone even threw a shoe at him, but he kept pointing, wordlessly now, to the north.
Pelikan looked in that direction and froze. A wind had blown away the fog and
he saw them clearly, huge black tanks, sitting motionless on a rise about a mile off. Pelikan’s stomach churned.
At that moment the first hysterical Rumanians appeared. Weaponless, screaming, they never paused in their flight. When one of them yelled that Russian troops were right behind, the news destroyed any semblance of order in the German ranks.
Pelikan and the others forgot all discipline. Orders rang out and were as quickly countermanded. Men swept belongings into trucks, which started sluggishly in the freezing weather. The commanding officer scurried to a light plane and took off to the south.
With Russian tanks still hovering on the slope, the rest of the German unit jumped into vehicles and roared away. Bouncing along in a bakery truck, Pelikan silently thanked God for the chance to survive.
At Golubinka, fifty miles to the southeast, Capt. Winrich Behr heard the details of the Soviet attack from Lt. Gerhard Stöck, the liaison officer posted to the Rumanian Third Army at Kletskaya. Stöck told him the Third Army had been torn apart, was running toward Golubinka, and Behr rushed to tell Paulus and Schmidt, who took the dreadful report calmly. Amazed and pleased at their composure, Behr waited while the generals analyzed the situation. Schmidt suddenly exclaimed: “We can hold!” Paulus agreed and ordered the 48th Panzer Corps to head north, into the breach along the Don.
Thirteen hundred miles to the west of Sixth Army Headquarters, Hitler slept soundly at the Berghof in the Bavarian Alps. The Führer had been there for nearly two weeks, dallying in his mountain retreat. But the problems he refused to acknowledge during the past summer and fall had pursued him. In Africa, the Allies were moving to trap Rommel’s legions; in Russia, his Soviet Union Intelligence expert, Col. Reinhard Gehlen, had just warned him of the extreme likelihood of a Russian counteroffensive behind Sixth Army.
Despite these reports, Hitler remained convinced that his Third Reich would endure. He was incredibly proud of the fact that his armies ruled more than three hundred million people: from the Atlantic coastline in France to the foothills of the Caucasus Mountains, from the northern capes of Norway to the bleached sands of Libya. He had reached an apogee of power. But on November 19, when the Red Army launched its massive counterattack at the Don, his Nazi empire began to wither imperceptibly. And though more than two years would pass before it finally collapsed, the decline would prove irreversible.
The World War II Chronicles Page 55